[From Litha to Lammas]: The Blood Incantation, gen, PG-13, 2/3
Part One.
Title: The Blood Incantation (2/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen except for mentions of past Charlus/Dorea and Fleamont/Euphemia
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: AU, dimension travel, angst, violence
Wordcount: This part 4400
Summary: AU. It’s 1972. Charlus Potter has been part of a secret strike force that managed to put down Lord Voldemort permanently, but at a heavy cost, including the lives of every other single Potter. Desperate to keep his family alive somehow, Charlus summons the ideal heir-and gets a stranger named Harry Potter from another world where the war extended much longer. Slowly, warily, Harry and Charlus become a family.
Author’s Notes: One of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics for this year. This will most likely have three parts.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Part Two
“Did you make your decision?”
“You’re rude early in the morning,” Harry muttered, dropping into a chair across the table from Charlus. He concealed a yawn behind his hand and eyed the man who had summoned him here. Charlus responded with what he probably thought was an encouraging smile.
It looked weary to Harry.
It had been a shock that he still wasn’t over to be in the middle of walking up to a platform where he would announce his own candidacy for Minister, and then suddenly appear in the middle of a field with ritual fires dying down behind him instead. And there were still parts of his soul that had only now started aching, ones connected to Ron and Hermione, Neville and George and Ginny.
But…
No, I promised myself that I wouldn’t think about that, Harry thought, and scowled down at the plate in front of him. Toast and eggs appeared there silently, making him blink and glance at Charlus. “Do you have house-elves here who only work in the kitchen like the ones at Hogwarts?”
“No.” Charlus reached with a fork for a bowl of ripe cherries in the center of the table. “I think it’s more that your scowl frightened them.”
Harry sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I still don’t like that you stole me from my world.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
Charlus’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry that you had to pay the price. I’m not going to apologize for using the ritual in the first place because, yes, I do need an heir for the family. There are creatures caged on our land that will be let loose if someone not of our bloodline holds it. And there are other considerations, but that was the most pressing one.”
Harry blinked as he dug into the eggs. “You didn’t say anything about that last night.”
“I thought it would across as trying to unfairly pressure you.”
Harry rolled his eyes and kept looking down at his food after that, while the thoughts he’d wanted to avoid bubbled up in his mind anyway.
He’d been working on repairing the damage the war had dealt to his world, he’d told Charlus last night, and that was true. But the damage looked to be increasing, not decreasing. Harry had only announced that he would run for Minister in the first place because, of all people, Lucius Malfoy was a candidate who looked to be doing well in public opinion.
Lucius Malfoy. Harry had stared into the eyes of people who had told him they would be voting for Malfoy, and half of them were Muggleborn. When he’d asked why, they had shaken their heads at him and said they wanted to be back to normal.
“Normal” meant not acknowledging the war. It meant acting as though Malfoy had really been under the Imperius, again, and that blood purity was a problem of the past. Given what Harry had heard Malfoy say with his own two ears since the war, he knew that wasn’t true.
Right now, of course, there was no Dark Lord to back up what Malfoy was saying. But he could achieve a level of political power that could make things as miserable for half-bloods and Muggleborns and others as though Voldemort still existed.
Harry had loathed the thought of putting himself forwards for political position, especially since he hadn’t even finished Auror training. But Hermione had told him, with tears running down her face, that there was no one else who could stand against Malfoy and defeat him while still representing their ideas.
So Harry had agreed, because his world had a desperate need. And he’d been snatched away and told he had to work for some different world’s desperate need, instead.
The thought he didn’t want to voice came squirming into his mind:
This need sounds easier to handle than the other one did.
Harry blinked and focused, and realized that he’d eaten only half the eggs and none of the toast. Charlus cleared his throat delicately across the table. “Is breakfast not to your liking? I can have the house-elves make something else. They were only guessing.”
“No, it’s fine,” Harry muttered, and reached for both his tea and some of the cherries. Another realization was sloshing around inside his head at the moment.
He might be able to keep some of that nonsense from even getting started here. So many people were probably dead as children-Dad, Mum, Snape, Remus, Sirius-but so was Voldemort. That meant he had a chance of building, from the beginning, a structure that didn’t stand on years of denial and weariness of war and desire for a “quiet life” above everything else.
Harry scowled again. Here he was thinking as though what Charlus had done was reasonable and he didn’t mind being snatched away to another world.
Or I’m living with the hand that I’ve been dealt, which is something that I have a lot of expertise in.
“Harry?”
Charlus was leaning towards him, brown eyes calm and concerned. Harry studied him and couldn’t find it in his heart to hate him, any more than he’d hated the people who wanted Lucius Malfoy elected. (He’d thought they were idiots, but he hadn’t hated them). They wanted normal. Charlus wanted normal.
Maybe, in a place that would have expectations of him as the Potter heir but not the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry could find some kind of normal.
“Yeah,” he said, and put the plate aside, and focused his attention on the man another version of him might have known if this world’s James had lived. “I’m ready to listen.”
*
That wasn’t as definitive a statement as Charlus would have hoped for, but it did make him relax. And it was probably premature to ask Harry to make a final decision, anyway. That would imply that snatching him away from his world really wasn’t a big deal and something he should get over with a night’s sleep.
“Would you like a tour of the house?” Charlus pushed his chair back from the table, and Harry stood. He absently waved his wand as he went, and his fine robes were Transfigured into a set of ordinary black ones.
“Sure,” Harry said with a faint smile. Charlus strode to his side as they walked away from the immense dining room table. It could seat eight and it was a little sentimental of Charlus to keep using it, perhaps, but it was tradition.
“Potter Place has some rooms that even I think are silly and don’t see much use,” Charlus said, getting a slightly stronger smile from Harry. “A sunroom and a ballroom and a room that used to be exclusively for listening to the music of the spheres.”
“Isn’t that an idea in Astronomy that doesn’t actually exist?”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t have wanted to tell my great-grandmother Alice Potter that,” Charlus muttered. Harry grinned at him, and Charlus caught a glimpse of James. Really, once Charlus got over the startling impact of his green eyes, he looked much more like a Potter than he’d seemed to at first.
“So I assume we won’t be seeing them.” Harry looked around as if estimating the height of the dome overhead, and then up the staircase that led to the bedrooms. “Are there wings that are shut up, or are those just scattered rooms in the middle of normal wings?”
“We don’t even have wings.”
“Look, this house is big enough to have wings. It looks like another Malfoy Manor.”
Charlus opened his mouth to defend himself, and then caught a glimpse of Harry’s face. The expression of innocence was too perfect to be real. “We don’t have their peacocks. We prefer pheasants and unicorns.”
“Well, as long as they’re not albino pheasants,” Harry said, and started up the staircase. Charlus followed him. Harry was tilting his head back and forth, eyes widening as they caught on the chandelier or, Charlus assumed, on how the staircase twisted.
“You truly didn’t grow up in a place anything like this,” Charlus said. His anger felt slow and dull after the long months of burning it had done over the attack on the Express, but now he felt it start simmering again. “You were deprived of every place that should have been yours.”
Harry shrugged, looking uncomfortable as he turned around again. “I have no idea what happened to you or Dorea in my world. I have no idea if you had children there. Maybe some cousin inherited all of this.”
Charlus chose to say nothing, because Harry was right, and differences between worlds were unpredictable. But he did feel that any cousin who could have inherited Potter Place and never contacted Harry wouldn’t have been worth his name.
They reached the top of the staircase, and Charlus introduced Harry to the library, the two small studies on this floor, and the maze of bedrooms. Harry looked a little dazed as they reached the end of the corridor. “Did you have a lot of guests, or was the Potter family much bigger at one time?”
“A combination of both.” Charlus took a glance into the neat white bedroom that his Aunt Martha had preferred, and shuddered a little at the constellations on the walls. Dorea had been of Black blood, too, but she hadn’t gone anything like so far with the chiming, smiling-faced star decorations. “We used to be larger and we invited friends in for the hunting, political debates, impromptu Quidditch matches, and the like.”
Harry was staring out the wide window at the end of the corridor, which pointed straight at the sunlit fields behind Potter Place. “Oh. Is this-you said something about a sanctuary for beasts that would otherwise get out?”
“I don’t know if I would call it a sanctuary or a prison,” Charlus said, moving to stand behind Harry. The green of the fields faded out into the blue of hills in the distance, the way it was supposed to look. “Do you see that river running near that large oak tree?”
“Yes,” Harry said a minute later.
Charlus nodded. “The river is a magical barrier. It isn’t real water. The beasts we’re responsible for are held behind it.”
Harry glanced sharply up at him. “And you’re absolutely sure that they deserve to be imprisoned there? They’re not being sneered at or looked down on the way the Ministry sneers at or looks down on goblins?”
“Goblins? What are you talking about? Why would we sneer or look down on them? They control all our money.”
“They don’t have large rebellions that a ghostly history professor at Hogwarts is obsessed by?” Harry turned and leaned on the wall, his arms folded.
“I’m less than impressed by the Dumbledore of your world if he never got rid of Binns,” Charlus muttered. “He was exorcised twenty years ago here. And no, although they did rebel until a few centuries ago because they wanted the right to hold wands. Maybe the attitudes towards goblins then were worse. I have to admit I didn’t study that field of history closely. But they won the right to hold wands, and since then, they seem to have been content to ignore us most of the time.”
Harry stared at him, then turned to face the barrier again. “What’s behind there? Dragons? Manticores?”
“Worse than either,” Charlus said softly, his mind turning briefly back to the one time that he’d dared to step through the barriers when he was still young. “They don’t have a form as such, but they’ll manifest in visions if you linger long enough. I’d call them plagues.”
“Why?”
“That’s what they would cause if they got out.”
Harry looked into the distance again. “I wonder why they never did that in my world.”
Charlus shrugged. “It’s perfectly possible that’s another of the differences, and they were never imprisoned at all, or someone found a way to destroy them forever.” He kept his fears quiet that they were probably already out, in Harry’s world. Without someone to accept the responsibilities of the barriers, even if it was just promising that they would have taken them up in the future, the Potter Place in Harry’s world wouldn’t have kept them contained more than a year or two.
“Perhaps.” Harry still looked disturbed as he ran a hand up and down the windowpane. Then he sighed and said, “I’d like to see the rest of the house.”
“Of course,” Charlus said smoothly, and turned towards the grand staircase again.
*
Harry frowned as he walked beside Charlus into the Wizengamot’s Diamond Debating Chamber, which wasn’t something he’d even known existed back in his own world. Charlus had Transfigured Harry’s plain black robes into something in subdued shades of green and gold, but also said that they’d have to get Harry some more clothes.
Privately, Harry agreed with that. If he was in this world forever-
Well, he still didn’t feel as much about that as he should, probably because he was internally reeling in shock and hadn’t comprehended what the loss really meant. But he would need clothes. He would need a permanent room of his own in Potter Place, and to get used to being the recognized heir to a pure-blood family.
Apparently.
That was honestly the weirdest fucking thing to think about. Of course Harry knew that his father in his own world and most of his ancestors had been pure-bloods, but no one had ever really pressed “what the Potter family means” on him.
“Charlus! Good to see you! And who’s this?”
Harry barely managed not to stare. The man walking towards him was one he’d never seen a portrait of, but he looked unmistakably like Sirius, if with sharper grey eyes and less laughter lines on his face. He had black robes with a bit of silver trim, and he put out a hand to shake Charlus’s without turning his interested gaze away from Harry.
“This is Harry Potter,” Charlus said, “my heir by flame and blood.”
“What?” Orion Black, because it must be him, stopped and switched his stare to Charlus this time. “You didn’t really conduct that ritual.”
“Yes, I did,” Charlus said, and smiled a little. Harry watched with his eyes a little narrowed, hoping he didn’t give anything away on his face that Charlus wouldn’t want him to give away. Then again, he might deserve it. “Come, Orion. You know that I mean my promises.”
“Yes, but I thought you were promising Augusta not to do it…” Orion trailed off and glanced at Harry. “And you’re not resentful about being stolen away from your world?”
“I’m pretty bloody resentful, actually,” Harry said. He enjoyed the way that made Orion blink. “And I don’t know how much I’ll like it here. And,” he added, because if this was going to go the same route of most nonsense with the Black family, he’d prefer to know right now, “I’m a half-blood.”
“Oh,” said Orion blankly. He didn’t seem to know what to say next.
“He’s still someone I’m happy to have at my side,” Charlus announced firmly. Harry had the impression that he might be talking to both of them. “I see Augusta on the other side of the room, actually, and I think I need to clear up some mistaken impressions there. I’ll probably hear you in the debate, Orion.” He turned and guided Harry towards an imposing blonde woman with a firm hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“Please don’t fight with Orion,” Charlus muttered under his breath as he walked. “It’s taken me a long time to convince him that our interests align. Although, to be fair,” and his steps slowed, “it was probably his elder son dying on the Hogwarts Express last year that really convinced him.”
“If he can go through that and still be convinced of blood purity, I don’t want to know him.”
“He’s not.” To Harry’s raised eyebrow, Charlus sighed and amended, “All right, so it still surprises him when he finds talent or power in someone who’s a half-blood or a Muggleborn. But he’s also coming around a lot faster than he used to.”
Harry said nothing. He would swallow back some of his words around Black if he had to, but he also wasn’t going to pretend that he liked the man or supported his views.
He got a lot of interested glances as they walked. Harry looked at some faces, but didn’t see many familiar ones. He was paying more attention to the Diamond Chamber, anyway, which appeared to live up to its name. Its walls were faceted and flashed fire, from what were either actual diamond panels or excellent imitations of them.
There were also long benches arranged around a central, circular table made of what might be a huge emerald, and might not. Harry stared at it mistrustfully. There were shimmers of magic moving in the depths of it.
“Augusta! May I introduce my new heir, Harry Potter?”
“You went and did it now, Charlus. I thought not even you would be so foolish, but you were. Idiot.”
Harry turned around with a start. Yes, Augusta Longbottom looked considerably younger than she had whenever Harry had seen her with a dead vulture on her hat back in his own world. She had a stronger jaw, a different hat decorated with cherries and grapes on her pale hair, and hands folded across her very pregnant stomach.
Harry swallowed and struggled not to avert his eyes. So Frank Longbottom had probably died on the train to Hogwarts, too, which meant Neville would never be born here.
To his surprise, Charlus only smiled. “I’m a live idiot, though, and Harry has kindly agreed to at least stay and work on helping me.”
“You said there was no way back.”
“So he has some fire in him, does he?” Augusta scanned him with critical eyes that looked as if they were the color of steel. “And he’s right, there’s no way back, but you could still have made things very difficult for this fool.”
“Maybe.” Harry met her gaze for gaze. “Voldemort wasn’t defeated so soon in my world. The war went on and on, and although some people survived there who didn’t here, a lot of them still died in the end. If I can prevent that from happening here, I’ll put up with my foolish-cousin.” At least that was a somewhat generic term for what Charlus was to him.
There was a long moment when Augusta paused as though she was choosing a new insult for him, but then she snorted and nodded. “Fine. At least someone might be able to see sense in this damn reflective madhouse.” And she strode towards the table in the center of the room and plopped herself firmly down on a curve of the nearest bench.
“She’s one of your allies, too?” Harry muttered as Charlus nodded to another part of the bench that they should take.
“Augusta is a friend,” Charlus said. “I don’t always listen to her, but I can count on her to be honest and let me know what she thinks of any course of action.”
Harry sighed as Hermione’s face seemed to rise up in front of him like smoke. He took a seat next to Charlus and studied the others. It did seem that most of the women who were here were pregnant, which he supposed shouldn’t be a surprise. Charlus had already told Harry that his wife Dorea had died, and that he didn’t want to marry again.
Although marrying someone else would have been less drastic than yanking me across the void, Harry thought, with a sigh that he kept to himself.
“Welcome to the Diamond Debating Chamber,” said the man standing at the portion of the table closest to the door. He must be Abraxas Malfoy, Harry thought; he would know that smarmy smirk anywhere. “Before we begin the perusal of the petitions passed on from the Ministry, I notice that we have an, ah, stranger among us.”
“Glad to see that you haven’t gone blind yet due to excessive age, Abraxas.” Charlus leaned forwards, and tapped Harry on the shoulder a little. He’d told Harry he would have to stand for the formal introductions, so Harry reluctantly did. “This is Harry Potter, my heir by flame and blood.”
“Not really,” Malfoy said, as though Harry would disappear like a soap bubble if he dismissed him hard enough. “You would be dead if you’d performed that ritual, Charlus.”
“I fully expect to have heart problems for the rest of my life,” Charlus said calmly. “But I summoned Harry here, and I promised him an introduction to the Wizengamot.”
Harry met Malfoy’s eyes, and smiled. There was a different kind of hatred there than he’d ever seen on a Malfoy’s face. Lucius had tended to look at him if he was a crawling bug; Draco had got infuriated or, towards the last few times Harry had seen him, guilty in a way that made him appear constipated. Abraxas looked as if dirt had assumed a human form and started talking.
“Yes, Harry Potter,” he said cheerfully. “I was the son of James Potter and the Muggleborn witch Lily Evans in my own world. I understand that that won’t happen here, as both of them died or likely died on the Hogwarts Express last year. I assume your son survived, of course?”
Malfoy opened his mouth and then didn’t seem to know how to continue. He finally cleared his throat and said, “Lucius was fortunate enough to survive.”
“Indeed. He must know how to pick his battles.”
Charlus coughed next to him. Harry smiled at Malfoy and sat down. “I understand I have a right to be here, unless you want both to declare that you doubt Cousin Charlus’s word and duel me.” He let his hand rest on his sleeve where his wand rested, and waited for Malfoy’s decision.
Malfoy jerked his head to the side. “The right of the Potter Heir to be here is unquestioned.” Of course, his eyes were all but begging someone else to bring up a challenge.
No one else did. Harry received a resentful glare before Malfoy shuffled the petitions and began in a nasal voice. “The first petition today concerns the right of the families of Muggleborns whose children died on the Express last year to receive compensation…”
*
“It’s revolting.”
Charlus watched as Harry paced back and forth in front of the dining room table. He was completely ignoring the meal the house-elves had brought out, which was fine. Honestly, Charlus didn’t think Harry would appreciate the food if he tried it now. “I know,” he said quietly. “That’s one of the reasons that I’m glad you’re here.”
“Because there’s so much blood prejudice on the Wizengamot?” Harry swung around. “You couldn’t challenge that yourself?”
“No,” Charlus said, and winced as he watched Harry retreat without movement. “Some of it was because I spent too many years protecting the family interests, and when I did say something that disputed Muggleborns or half-bloods being less than hippogriff dung, no one took it seriously. They thought it was just a political move.”
“And the other times that you did something?” Harry at least dropped into his chair, but he leaned backwards and put his feet on the table.
“I made bargains with some of my allies,” Charlus admitted. At the time, he had felt sternly proud of those bargains, convinced they were the best they could do. Now, they seemed to shrink under Harry’s clear gaze until they were more like stains on the Wizengamot’s annals. “They supported my suggestions or legislation that worked against blood purity, but in exchange for their support, they had me throw my vote behind legislation that-well. It wasn’t blood purist, but it was a pretty shaky compromise.”
“So then everyone assumed those other things you supported were what you really believed.”
Charlus nodded. “They tended to be laws that were more likely to get passed, too, and to make more impact on day-to-day life in the wizarding world.”
Harry stared out the window in the dining room for a long moment. Then he faced Charlus abruptly. “Why did Sirius Black die on the Hogwarts Express? I thought you said Voldemort spared the children of his followers.”
Charlus closed his eyes. “Sirius joined James in the fight. He apparently knew enough Dark spells that he injured some Death Eaters. They lost their tempers and forgot the instructions that said they weren’t supposed to harm Orion’s son.”
He opened his eyes at Harry’s silence to see him also sitting there with his eyes closed. “They must have become instant friends when they met on the Express. That’s what they did in my world,” Harry whispered. “Sirius was my godfather.” He started to say something else, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I want you to know that I’m not going to play the cautious political game.”
“I’m glad.”
“Why, when you’ve done that?”
“Because I was a coward in some ways,” Charlus whispered. It was a struggle to keep meeting Harry’s eyes, but he did it-and in some ways, it was a relief, to confess at last what he had never been able to admit even to Dorea. “I told myself that I had to put the interests of my family before my own beliefs. And I did that even when I could have talked about those beliefs with little cost. I did that when I should have seen, long before Voldemort’s rise, that some of the pure-bloods simply wouldn’t be swayed no matter what, and it wasn’t worth any effort to court them and make them my allies. I became too much like the pure-bloods I despised.
“You can’t do that anyway, because of your heritage. And you have the fire and the courage to persist. Look at you-a few days here, and you’re adapting already. I couldn’t do that. Almost no one I know could. Yes, I’ll be happy to have you represent our family, Harry, and pull the Potter wealth and power back in line with what the Potter ideals should be.”
Harry considered him in silence when Charlus wound down. Then he nodded and said, “As long as you realize that things are going to change,” and reached for the first of the plates Charlus had been keeping under a Warming Charm.
Charlus relaxed, and let the silence persist.
Part Three.
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